[extropy-chat] The Space Odyssey Explained

[Damien Broderick]

At 04:15 PM 3/11/2005 +0100, Amara wrote:

>This is a wonderful 'explanation' of the key features of the classic
>Kubrick 2001 movie.

It's a nifty interpretation, Amara. Arthur Clarke would have a cow, I 
suspect. What struck me with surprise was how close the allegorization is 
to my own reworking of the Oedipus myth (see below) 30 years ago in the 
story `Growing Up', an extract from my novel THE JUDAS MANDALA.

Damien Broderick

=========================

[Beth] speaks in chomsky, the basic language she shares with Sriyanie and 
the other Frees: the syntax of her utterance provides its own unassailable 
conviction.

Above [Sriyanie], the sun moves toward noon in the improbably clear sky. 
She has put it there. Sweat springs from her skin, trickles in her armpits. 
The wine is clean and tart on her tongue; she puts down her glass and 
shades her eyes, glorying in the universe she has hewn with Beth.

"Let me tell you a story," her Other says, turning over and digging her 
elbows in the sand. "It's a very old tale, one of the oldest we know. Have 
you heard of Oedipus, the Swollen-Footed King?"

"I don't think so. Greek?"

"One of the mythic figures of the archaic Hellenic culture." Both says. 
"His father was King Laius, the Left-sided; his grandfather, Labdakos, the 
Lame. Laius is banished from his city of Thebes and develops a homosexual 
bond with the charioteer Chrysippus, his patron's son. In time he regains 
his throne, marries Jocasta, but refrains from heterosex because an oracle 
has revealed that her son will kill him. During a fertility rite, though, 
Laius grows drunk and lustful, and Oedipus is conceived.

"The baby is consigned for execution to a herdsman and staked by his foot 
to a chilly mountaintop. Before Oedipus can perish from exposure, however, 
a peasant finds him and rears him in secrecy.

"Years later, the adult Oedipus returns to Thebes in a chariot and meets 
Laius on his way to the Delphic oracle. During an argument over right of 
precedence on the road, Laius causes his son's horse to be slain. In fury, 
and ignorant of their relationship, the young man kills his father.

"Subsequently the road to Thebes is terrorized by the Sphinx, a monster. To 
win the widowed Queen's hand, which is the most direct path to political 
advancement available to him, Oedipus meets the monster in contest. He is 
riddled: 'What creature goes in the morning on four feet, at noon on two, 
and in the evening on three?' He answers correctly: 'Man.' In mortification 
the Sphinx takes her own life."

Sriyanie has been listening with keen interest, playing sand through her 
fingers. She smiles.

"For many years," Beth says, "Oedipus reigns in Thebes, fathering children 
by Jocasta, his all-unknown mother. As you can see, the chronology is 
somewhat strained; the ancient Greeks had no antiagathic drugs. Well, at 
last Thebes is afflicted with plague and famine. An oracle reveals that the 
cause is royal incest and the parricide that made it possible. Jocasta 
commits suicide and Oedipus goes mad, tearing out his eyes. He leaves the 
city once again, attended only by his daughter Antigone, and eventually 
attains supernatural insight."

Beth falls silent. Sriyanie gazes at the dazzling waves, musing.

"It's lovely, Beth," she says. "Austere and terribly somber. I think I'll 
suggest it for a Being-Them." She sucks at her lip. "I guess Antigone came 
back to Thebes and took the throne?"

"No. Oedipus had sons also­it was very rare for women to rule."

"Oh. Then I imagine the rightful heir was driven out and came back 
eventually to seize the crown."

"Something like that. If I remember properly, Eteocles banished Polynices, 
who brought back an army, and both the contending brothers were killed. You 
see something cyclical, then?"

"Beth, it's so rich in resonances I don't know which harmonic to start 
with. It taps right into the grammar structures. But, look, if it's a myth 
it can't stand by itself. It's just one element in a huge redundant 
cultural mosaic, and anything I see must be so partial­"

"Naturally. But, Sri, myth is also cellular, holonic. Within the larger 
context, each part has its own integrity. Tell me what you got."

"Well, right, the basic structure's cyclical, but it's also paradoxical. 
And there are strong cybernetic features: the road to Thebes is obviously 
part of a primary information circuit, a model for data flow and decisions, 
and the Sphinx catapults that up to a metalevel. I mean, roadways are the 
most blatant symbol any low-mobility culture can use to work out their 
problems with internal and external dynamics. There's also that beautiful 
loop where the Urban child is menaced by the Pastoral intermediary, and 
saved by the Agrarian benefactor, and comes back to master the town, and 
ends up transfigured again in the Rural domain."

Beth considers her through a mesh of lashes. "Low-mobility cultures also 
placed great store by kinship regulations."

"Oh sure," the girl says dismissively. "There's that whole strident incest 
thing, with Laius symbolically fucking his son, and Oedipus actually 
fucking his mother, and their town getting the pox. That's only a surface 
reading, I'm sure­though I daresay the old storytellers did plenty of 
winking and nudging. What fascinates me is the deep resonance. You know, 
it's extraordinary: the whole thing's about us and the ull. The dreadful 
road to high technology. Where it leads, and the way out. Maybe the way out."

"You understood the meaning of the Sphinx's riddle?"

Sriyanie preens. "I've heard of walking sticks. And chariots. Yes, Beth. 
Man begins as an animal, passes through the bipedal state of 
hunter-gatherer culture, freeing his hands to use tools, and finally leans 
so heavily on his technology that it's completely introjected. Actually," 
she says with surprise, "I guess there's a sense in which that's true of 
individuals, too: crawling on all fours as babies... "

She trails off and immense shock shows in her face. Abruptly she jumps to 
her feet and runs to the sea, discarding her robe, and splashes wildly in 
the ebbing tide. Waist deep, she submerges, comes up coughing, light 
glinting from her pale body. The water lifts her like an aninertial field, 
tugs her gently toward the long dark line of the horizon. Shrieking in 
delight, she turns, paddling clumsily, forges to the shore, races in a 
dog-legged curve of deep footprints back to Beth.

"It's all about me", she gasps, out of breath, flat on her back. "Me and 
Pause and that weird thing that happened. Ummy, you are sly! It's a myth of 
the steps in the development of personality."

"Bravo!" applauds Both. "Don't give me too much credit for ingenuity, 
though. The old psychologists recognized as much thousands of years ago, as 
far back as Jean Piaget. Some of them even used it to denominate the 
principal stages of individuation: the Oedipus Nexus."

"Yes! Yes!" Sriyanie cries. "So, to incorporate the metalevels lots of the 
details convey the exact opposite of what they actually mean. Old 
Swollen-Foot begins in the sensorimotor stage­so one limb is crippled! He 
develops through magic omnipotence, climaxing his journey through the 
preoperational stage with the ultimate magical act of killing his father. 
What's the next bit? Why, yes, to attain adult estate he's obliged to deal 
at the concrete operational level with a riddle­and the riddle, of course, 
is a rebus for the entire myth, mapping individual onto cultural 
development. And when he finally passes into the formal operational stage 
of adulthood, his insight into the kinship crime represented by his 
incestuous marriage hurls him into mystical consciousness. It's all elided 
and compressed, but it's all there." She is fairly bouncing with delight. 
"Oedipus tears out his eyes because they are the organs of guilty 
perception. And that loops right back to his crime, since a baby's first 
social transaction is with her mother, through their mutual gaze. And 
mystical insight requires a new metalevel anyway, going beyond rigorous 
formal operations into antinomies and paradox. I'm devastated, Beth. How 
sublimely those old savages captured it all!"

Her drying hair clings to her scalp like pale fronds. Beth musses it and 
gets to her feet. All trace of their repast is gone. "They weren't really 
savages, Sri. They were at the very beginning of the path leading to the 
industrial cities, to the thinking machines. They had no inkling of Pause, 
though, I imagine. That had to wait until metrodynamic discontinuity, 
though some of the scholars disagree with me on that. Why do you think the 
story is about you?"

They climb the sand hills, away from the beach. Insects buzz among the 
flowering grasses, the tropical trees.

"Well, this virtual matrix we're in was built up the same way. I knew you 
were with me, but I felt omnipotent... and lost. Then the phylogenetic 
codes came snapping in, one by one, and everything sort of... crystallized."